Helpful hints

My gift of savviness to you:

It's my annual - actually every two years - period of shopping around for a new phone, as my "New Every Two" $100 rebate kicks in next month with Verizon Wireless.

I've been eyeing the LG Voyager and found that the Circuit City on 86th Street (and probably most of their stores) has a small Verizon section with a dedicated salesperson. They don't have as many models as you can find in a Verizon store, but they have all the popular ones - and it was so much easier to get help and play with the phones there than in the actual Verizon store just up the block on E. 86th.

Whatever you do, stay away from that one!

The salespeople are clueless. If you ask three different salespeople the same question, you can easily get three different answers. Where do they find those guys?

Also, regular readers may remember my kvetching recently about catching a computer virus and having to reload my Windows XP operating system and therefore lose all my bookmarks, music, etc.

Well, on the bookmarks front, I found a great site called my.foxmarks.com which saved my butt from having to re-enter them all into the new system.

You simply create a free account with a user name and password, and, assuming you use the Firefox browser - which I hope you all do as it's MUCH superior to Internet Explorer - it basically pulls in all your bookmarks from your computer and syncs them onto its site. This allows you to log into your account from any computer and access them. When I loaded in the new XP system, I went back to the my firefox page, it retrieved all my saved bookmarks and put them back on my browser.

And, of course, now I can log onto my account on any computer in the world and use my bookmarks on it too. Beautiful.